And this year, Geyr had a new twist on the inspections—a set of enormous mastiffs as tall as a child’s first pony. Geyr claimed they had noses “keen enough to track the West Wind.” He’d acquired them on the march home last year, but had been looking for something like them ever since a load of poisoned grain killed two horses on campaign.

He wanted to use them as additional camp-guards and on scouting runs. Kero was a bit doubtful of the latter-she couldn’t see how Geyr would keep them from barking, for one thing—but she had agreed to try them out as wagon inspectors. Their sense of smell was certainly as good as Geyr claimed, and they could be trained to recognize any scent and alert their handler to it. And their sheer size had the wagoners as terrified of them as the recruits were of Geyr.

I suppose now the other Companies are going to start calling us “the dog-and-pony show, ” she thought with a sigh. I could keep those little messengers out of sight, but I’m never going to be able to hide those monsters.

On the other hand, Warrl had been damned useful to the Sunhawks. What these mastiffs lacked in intelligence, they might make up for in strength, size and numbers.

I wonder where he got them. She still suspected they were from the Pelagirs. He had spent quite a bit of time in the company of Kra‘heera, the cousin that just happened to be an apprentice shaman. What the shaman didn’t know about the Pelagirs, the Hawkbrothers did, and the Hawkbrothers and shaman were probably talking more than most people guessed.

We were coming up through Ruvan, along the Pelagiris Forest; we met up with a couple of the cousins on the way, after I’d left word of our route with one of the Outriders. I remember that he and Kra‘heera vanished about the same time, telling me he ’d get back to the fort on his own—then in he comes, just before the first snow, with the bitch and her half-grown litter of fourteen. That kind of fertility all by itself is suspicious, and smacks of the Pelagirs.

The Shin‘a’in didn’t use dogs much, except for herding sheep and goats—but the Hawkbrothers might well have been able to produce something like Geyr’s dogs on very short notice.

She watched them checking out the wagons, one on each side, and it did not escape her notice that they performed their duty with a brisk efficiency that reminded her of her own veterans. Certainly there was an odd look of intelligence in their eyes-unlike Geyr’s little messenger-dogs, who had brains that would shame a bird, or at least acted like it. They knew three things only—eat, run, and be petted.